Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard Voices in Time I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here—great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively]. This is the B-E axis. Now let me give you a marketing tip. Another is called “Boy Meets Girl,” but this needn’t be about a boy meeting a girl [begins drawing line B]. Now, I don’t mean to intimidate you, but after being a chemist as an undergraduate at Cornell, after the war I went to the University of Chicago and studied anthropology, and eventually I took a masters degree in that field. One of the most popular stories ever told starts down here [begins line C below B-E axis]. There’s to be a party at the palace. It’s a pessimistic story. His father has just died.
Blog livres The Mystery of Charles Dickens by Joyce Carol Oates Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin Penguin, 527 pp., $36.00 Charles Dickens: A Life (Waterstone’s Special Edition) by Claire Tomalin, with an appendix of selected letters by Dickens London: Viking, 542 pp., £30.00 The life of almost any man possessing great gifts, would be a sad book to himself. Is Dickens the greatest of English novelists? London. Fog everywhere. And equally characteristic of Dickens, a chapter opening in the lesser-regarded and uncompleted The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in which a natural observation acquires a portentous metaphoric significance: Irresistibly the reader is drawn into the voice—exquisitely lyric, yet with a profound melancholy beneath—of the child Philip Pirrip—“Pip”—of Great Expectations: Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. The narrative is present-tense; the mood is suspenseful. This is a very small episode in the life of Dickens, but it allows us to see him in action….
séminaire ehess Pour une épistémologie du littéraire II L’objectif du séminaire est d’examiner les conditions de possibilité d’une épistémologie qui prenne pour base la réflexion littéraire. Depuis la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle, l’épistémologie et la philosophie des sciences connurent un essor qui marqua aussi les sciences humaines et sociales ; un certain nombre de disciplines – comme la philosophie, l’anthropologie, la sociologie – développèrent alors une réflexion systématique sur les enjeux épistémologiques qui leur étaient spécifiques, y compris en interrogeant la notion même de discipline. En revanche, les théoriciens de la littérature se concentrèrent essentiellement sur les enjeux internes à leur champ d’études. Mardi 8 novembre : L'Initiation à la recherche. Du rôle de la valeur dans la communauté intellectuelle. Lectures : Barthes, Roland : « Jeunes chercheurs », Le bruissement de la langue. Mardi 22 novembre : Discipline, interdisciplinarité, spécialisation Lectures : Mardi 24 janvier : Innovation et tradition. Kuhn, T.
Interview w DFW Context N°21 Shimon Ballas. Outcast. Trans. Ammiel Alcalay and Oz Shelach. In Outcast Shimon Ballas introduces an old man, a Jew born in Iraq who converted to Islam in the 1930s, reviewing his divided existence. Violette Leduc. The lady of the title is a desirous Mrs. Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlap. “Rest areas, monotonous? Christine Brooke-Rose. The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus, first issued in 1986, provides a crash course in this prolific author’s too long neglected fiction, offering four of her early novels: Out (1964), Such (1966), Between (1968), and Thru (1975). Zanele Muholi THE HEART'S ETERNAL VOW - Pynchon on Marquez By Thomas Pynchon; Thomas Pynchon, author of ''Gravity's Rainbow,'' has been working on another novel.Published: April 10, 1988 LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA By Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated by Edith Grossman. 348 pp. LOVE, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, remind us, love is strange. At the same time, where would any of us be without all that romantic infrastructure, without, in fact, just that degree of adolescent, premortal hope? In the postromantic ebb of the 70's and 80's, with everybody now so wised up and even growing paranoid about love, once the magical buzzword of a generation, it is a daring step for any writer to decide to work in love's vernacular, to take it, with all its folly, imprecision and lapses in taste, at all seriously -that is, as well worth those higher forms of play that we value in fiction. And - oh boy - does he write well. HERE'S what happens.
Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France - DGLFLF De tous les liens que nouent les hommes dans la cité, le lien de la langue est le plus fort, parce qu’il fonde le sentiment d’appartenance à une communauté. Parce que la mondialisation des échanges et les progrès de la construction européenne ne cessent de le faire évoluer, les pouvoirs publics sont appelés à réaffirmer une politique de la langue qui, tout en veillant à garantir la primauté du français sur le territoire national, participe à l’effort de cohésion sociale et contribue à la promotion de la diversité culturelle en Europe et dans le monde. La délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France élabore la politique linguistique du Gouvernement en liaison avec les autres départements ministériels. Organe de réflexion, d'évaluation et d'action, elle anime et coordonne l'action des pouvoirs publics pour la promotion et l'emploi du français et veille à favoriser son utilisation comme langue de communication internationale.
When Respected Authors, from Goethe to Kerouac, Try Their Hand at Painting Freshly posted on publisher Melville House‘s blog, you’ll find examples of visual art by textual artists; drawings and paintings, in other words, drawn and painted by people who have gone down in history for their way with sentences. This could easily turn into a lesson about not quitting one’s day job. But, as you can see from the work above, Maria Nys Huxley at Siesta, Melville House blogger Kevin Murphy hasn’t put together a study in the incompetence of the dilettante. You’ve surely already guessed the literary connection: the painting came from the hand of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, who put his wife Maria Nys to canvas in 1920, when both were still in their twenties. The post features more paintings from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, Hermann Hesse, e.e. cummings, Zelda Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor, and Henry Miller. Can you guess the author — er, artist? via @KirstinButler
Lettres & Langues et Cultures de l'Antiquité Le Lachès appartient à la série dite des « Premiers Dialogues » de Platon, œuvres de jeunesse de l’auteur. Découvrez son adaptation théâtrale à la Villa Gillet du 13 au 16 mars 2018. Plus d’informations ci-dessous : Le Lakhès de Platon à la Villa Gillet Le nouveau thème au programme du BTS : "Seuls avec tous". Ce thème vaudra pour les sessions 2019 et 2020. Le festival européen Latin Grec se tiendra à Lyon du 22 au 25 mars 2018 : retrouvez le programme et le lien pour les inscriptions. Le portail Lettres sur le site Eduscol. La lettre d’information d’Eduscol pour accompagner les enseignants dans la mise en oeuvre des nouvelles modalités d’évaluation vient de paraître. Retrouvez sur Eduscol des ressources pour l’évaluation des niveaux de maîtrise du socle commun. Retrouvez des ressources de la BnF sur les civilisations et les cultures de l’Antiquité. La seconde lettre Edu_Num thématique, "L’esprit critique", vient de paraître.
Nietzsche Is Dead Count Harry Kessler received the news in the officers’ mess of his army regiment from a fellow officer going through dispatches. On October 25, 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche, who had famously announced the death of God, had himself died. During the previous decade, Nietzsche’s writings had taken German culture by storm. One of Kessler’s friends joked that “six educated Germans cannot come together for a half hour without Nietzsche’s name being mentioned.” Nietzsche had become a hero—and cult figure—to those who wanted to reimagine Germany; and a villain to those who remained attached to Germany’s Protestant roots and traditional order. The philosopher’s tragic decline only added to his mystique. As Nietzsche’s ideas were being adapted to various and contrary ends by avant-garde artists, psychoanalysts, and racial ideologues, his death provoked a battle over his legacy. The count was a man of voracious intellect and endless charm, as well as a deeply committed diarist.
Arthur Rimbaud’s Brief Career On a winter day in 1883, aboard a steamer that was returning him from Marseilles to the Arabian port city of Aden, a French coffee trader named Alfred Bardey struck up a conversation with a countryman he’d met on board, a young journalist named Paul Bourde. As Bardey chatted about his trading operation, which was based in Aden, he happened to mention the name of one of his employees—a “tall, pleasant young man who speaks little,” as he later described him. To his surprise, Bourde reacted to the name with amazement. This wasn’t so much because, by a bizarre coincidence, he had gone to school with the employee; it was, rather, that, like many Frenchmen who kept up with contemporary literature, he had assumed that the young man was dead. What Bardey learned about Rimbaud that day is still what most people know about Rimbaud. Depending on your view of human nature, either everything or nothing about Rimbaud’s drab origins explains what came later. I’m now making myself as scummy as I can.
THE DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AUDIO PROJECT | Audio archive of interviews with, profiles of, readings by, and eulogies to David Foster Wallace. de Beauvoir In Which We Prefer To Be Simone De Beauvoir Paris Girl by ELLEN COPPERFIELD What is an adult? A child blown up by age. Young Simone de Beauvoir shared her room with the maid. Outside her family's Paris apartment was the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard du Montparnesse. at her usual table in the Café de Flore, 1945 Her parents spoke to her only in a reproving tone during those difficult years. She wrote of Hélène that "she was my accomplice, my subject, my creature. the sisters aged three and five Although Simone's father was engaged in the slow process of falling out of the upper class, he would not send his children to the public lycée, fearing contamination. The de Beauvoirs fled Paris in fear at the onset of the first World War, but soon returned. In her 1990 biography, Deirdre Bair recalls Simone's younger sister Hélène telling her, "In our games when she liked to play the saint, I think it must have given me pleasure to martyrize her even though she was so kind. Most of Simone and Hélène's classmates had left the city.